Kanye West, Stanley Crouch, and the struggle for literacy

"Read a book! Read a book! Read a muh'f**kin book!/
Read a book! Read a book! Read a muh'f**kin book!/
... Not a sports page (what), not a magazine (who)/
But a book ni**a, a f**kin book ni**a/"

-- G-Mike, "Read A Book," Unthugged Vol. 2, 2007.

"... I read one-fourth of the Library of Alexandria/"

-- Canibus, "Master Thesis," Mic Club: The Cirriculum, 2002. 

At a recent signing of his new book, "Thank You and You Are Welcome," Chicago MC Kanye West apparently said the following: "Sometimes people write novels and they just be so wordy and so self-absorbed. I am not a fan of books. I would never want a book's autograph. I am a proud nonreader of books. I like to get information from doing stuff like actually talking to people and living real life."

Of course coming from a teacher's son, and a distinguished one at that, many have taken to underline how much of a disappointment, to the late Dr. Donda West (R.I.P.), his comments must be. As they see it, Dr. West, renowned as chairwoman of Chicago State University's English department, had to be a "fan" and "reader" of books. Kanye's critics, therefore, have piled on him, accusing him of promoting "illiteracy" among young, adoring fans.  

As a voracious reader of books, I can't agree more that literacy is, indeed, a tool of empowerment, and anyone who would seek to deny young people this reality deserves the hottest hotel room in hell. I also believe that a generation so undereducated (and mis-educated), as this one, should be encouraged, by all means, to nurture their innate desire for critically reflective work. This must be the aim of every socially-aware entertainer.

That said, however, it would be disingenuous, if not dangerous, to simply adopt the opinions of Hip-Hop antagonists like Stanley Crouch, who couldn't wait to prosecute Kanye for "floundering in the sea of irresponsibility that allows grown men and women to never leave the ranch of their adolescence." West's statements smacked of "mirror-licking narcissism," Crouch wrote, giving rise to a cultural phenomenon where "individual freedom is mistaken for merely breaking the rules by rebelling against some version of authority or saying simple-minded and stupid things just because a mike is pushed in front of one's mouth."

If all this comes simply for suggesting correctly that many novelists are self-absorbed and verbose, or for indicating that books aren't the only source of intelligence, critics like Crouch might want to aim their rhetorical water pistols at the 25% population, on a national scale, which go an entire year without reading a single book.   

Knee-jerk judges are also probably unenlightened about Loop Dreams, a South Central-based offshoot of The Kanye West Foundation, which uses Hip-Hop to teach young students the values of education.

In a recent interview with Essence magazine, West talked about the essence of education, and how his program is meant to cut through the staggeringly high dropout-rates among inner-city students: "I believe that anything that you have to pay for is a choice, and high school is mandatory to gain some basic skills. Therefore, it's easy for me to build a foundation that encourages young people to stay in high school." Prior to that, he questioned the notion that education can be restricted to the walls of academia: "At what point are you really done finishing your education?"

This notion that education is universal, and the learning process perpetual, has certainly found refuge in the critical work of many progressive scholars like Michel Foucault, Henry David Thoreau, Paulo Freire, bell hooks, Cornel West, Henry Giroux, Susan Giroux, and Lenore Daniels. Having a celebrated Hip-Hop artist reiterate it, and to a younger generation, should earn the applause of even his toughest critics. But it won't.

In the interview, Kanye West also shot back at the likes of Stanley Crouch: "When people can't understand someone who might be presenting new ideas and thoughts because it sounds too different from what they are used to, they see me as an egomaniac, rather than viewing it as a difference of opinion or way of thinking."

It may not be that they "can't understand," but that they choose not to understand. After all, ignorance is "a passion."

Jacques-Marie-Émile Lacan, the late, legendary French psychoanalyst, used those terms in describing the "passion of ignorance." He explained ignorance as having a stronger impulse than even love and hate. In his analysis, it wasn't just the absence of knowledge, information or awareness, it was a passion for that absence, a mode of resistance to any medium through which that absence could be mitigated. Ignorance, he insisted, cuts across the grain of misrecognition, for misrecognition still embodies an idea of what is being misrecognized.

In this instance, Lacan's theory couldn't yield more truth. Crouch and his cohorts are not merely missing the point. They intentionally disregard the core of Kanye West's antipathy for books. Beyond being a "proud nonreader of books" (notice the emphasis on books--he might be an avid reader of scholarly journals, business magazines, online articles, speeches, etc.), he mentioned sharing no such sentiments for "information." This is critical.

"I like to get information from doing stuff like actually talking to people and living real life."

In "Peak Learning: How to Create Your Own Lifelong Education Program for Personal Enjoyment and Professional Success," Ronald Gross explains how different learning styles can produce the same result, under variable conditions. He gave an example of a New York apparel-industry trade Editor, Nicholas Naritz, who discovered that in trying to learn about French culture, he "felt uneasy at the 'scraps of knowledge' he was accumulating, as he put it, from an assortment of books he had bought." [Gross, Ronald. Peak Learning: How to Create Your Own Lifelong Education Program for Personal Enjoyment and Professional Success. Los Angeles: Jeremy P. Tarcher, Inc., 1991., p. 83.]

It is unclear whether Nicholas was a book-lover or not, but he soon discovered that his "preferred way of learning... [was to] absorb the spirit of a field by talking with people in it."

This is what Kanye meant by "actually talking to people and living real life." Living "real" life.

Nicholas Naritz, through a series of brain exercises, arrived at that conclusion, which led to discarding the books and magazines he had picked up to learn about French culture and, instead, "attending events at the Alliance Française." He later reported: "I just picked up what I needed to know, just by osmosis." [p. 84]

It's unlikely Kanye's critics would be willing to embrace this unorthodox perspective. Again: Ignorance. Is. A. Passion.

The only criticism I find credible, vis-à-vis  such comments, is that it often leads to the perpetuation of a destructive stereotype that Hip-Hop is anti-intellectual, or that Black youths, overall, find cerebral activities unappealing. That, I find troublesome. We saw its manifestation earlier this year in a study conducted by Virgil Griffiths, a PhD student in California, titled "Music That Makes You Dumb," which all but condemned Hip-Hop as intellectually deficient.   

In that case, I agree with author RK Byers, that those who, like Kanye, defy social order should apply more delicacy, so as not to lend credence to forces which seek to destroy this great trans-generational culture. Byers wrote: "Of all the criticisms that hip hop fans are forced to allow about our stars... we check immediately the clowns that try to tell us that they're all illiterate." He went further:  

Who can forget Ice Cube's "Unlike Iceberg Slim and all of them be/claimin' P.I.M.P." nod to the great Black writer Iceberg Slim? Or Tupac claiming Donald Goines to be his "father figure?" Jay-Z references "The Coldest Winter Ever", "Monster" and a "Tree Grows in Brooklyn" on his "Blueprint 2? release.... The best example of rap literary referencing though has to be Common's breath-stopping "If rap was Harlem/I'd be James Baldwin".

It is true that Hip-Hop culture has kept alive the vibrant legacy of intellectualism that was handed down by older Black Art Movements. Examples of this can be seen with the exceptional literacy initiative, Hip Hop Educational Literacy Program (H.E.L.P.)., put forth by Hip-Hop artist Asheru. Traces of Hip-Hop's dedication to scholarly discipline are also surrendered in the works of legendary South-Bronx MC KRS-One, who, as author of several books, recently joined forces with PowerHouse Books, to launch a Hip-Hop imprint, I Am Hip Hop. When reflecting on the Nkiru Center for Education and Culture, Brooklyn's oldest Black bookstore, operated by power duo Talib Kweli and Mos Def (Black Star), it becomes obvious that Hip-Hop is not the Sodom and Gomorrah paradise uninformed critics make it out to be. With the academic accomplishments of pioneers like Roxanne Shanté, Ph.D., there should be no doubt that Hip-Hop does treasure educational excellence. And anyone familiar with the highly underrated Jamaica-born MC Canibus, cannot successfully claim that Hip-Hop and intellectual curiosity are mutually exclusive.

It is unfortunate that when Kanye West speaks openly about his decision to drop-out of College, eyebrows are raised, knuckles get cracked, and critics suddenly develop flaming tongues. To my knowledge, nobody though it right to protest Talib Kweli, himself a College drop-out, when he rapped ("Over The Counter," Liberation, 2007): "I went to college, then I left, that's when I got my education/." Why? It might be that, deep down, in the inner recesses of our soul, we find his points valid (more on that next week).

The day education becomes limited to the information a teacher can pass to a student, such society self-annihilates. Haters can pile on Kanye all they want (a growing fad), but he didn't need a book to speak eloquently in 2005, with the lucidity of a public intellectual, against the injustices of the Bush administration's criminal incompetence in the recovery efforts of Hurricane Katrina; or in his lightning-like remonstration against the corporate press for "the way they portray us in the media." Without the use of a page filled with words, he successfully reasoned that the government is "set up to help the poor, the black people, the less well-off, as slow as possible."  

If a "proud nonreader of books" could articulate, effortlessly, the pain and anguish millions of people felt, books might not be as helpful as largely suggested. Even though I hope young students are encouraged to seek out the treasures of life hidden in great texts of Literature, Philosophy, Astronomy, Education, Religion, Morality, and History, I can't possibly insist that they all do, knowing that learning patterns differ, therefore determining individual interests in book-reading.

"Mr. West" is being ridiculed, but he has consistently put great effort into securing a quality educational future for poverty-stricken kids; and, in truth, that's more than many other Hip-Hop artists, even his critics, can lay claim to.